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De jure naturae et gentium, “The law of nature and of nations,” is the title of Samuel Pufendorf's eight-volume masterpiece of philosophical jurisprudence, first published in 1672. It provides the tag by which an entire discourse is known, one that dominated legal philosophy at European universities for over two hundred years. Pufendorf's Protestant articulation of its principles was pivotal both for transmitting it to the Eighteenth Century and for giving it a history, which in his eyes began with his fellow-Protestant Hugo Grotius. In fact, however, its roots stretch back to the early Sixteenth Century, to the lawyers whom Philip Melanchthon gathered around him at Wittenberg and (more importantly for the future structure of the discourse) to the Catholic scholastic theologians who were originally based at Salamanca in Spain but subsequently spread out over the whole of Counter-Reformation Europe. In the confessional conflict that would burn throughout the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, theologians on all sides used law to define the space of the political, and used the idea of natural law to underpin that space, even while shaping it differently according to their divergent narratives of sin and redemption. While the ius naturae et gentium was an academic genre, therefore, its content was not. It was a theory and a legitimation of the state, and the arc of its reasoning from nature to the nations ran through the institution of political power. The state and its power are constructed not so much upon right (ius) per se but on the potential for the violation of right (iniuria), and the demand for such violation to be vindicated, by law or ultimately by war. At its very barest—although this is to traduce the richness and complexity of the discourse—the ius naturae et gentium is thus a theory of legitimate violence. When it comes to animals, what we find is that they are systematically excluded from the potential to suffer violation of right and therefore from political space and political justice. As we shall see, however, this did not always mean that they were totally excluded from any kind of right or that every act of violence against them was always legitimate.

Quentin Skinner accorded scholastic authors a prominent role in putting in place ‘the foundations of modern political thought’. This much is plain if we consider the four essential preconditions for ‘the acquisition of the modern concept of the State’ that he listed in his conclusion. Skinner postulated, first, that ‘the sphere of politics should be envisaged as a distinct branch of moral philosophy, a branch concerned with the art of government’; secondly, that ‘the independence of each regnum or civitas from any external and superior power should be vindicated and assured’; that ‘the supreme authority within each independent regnum should be recognised as having no rivals within its own territories as a law-making power and an object of allegiance’; and finally that ‘political society is held to exist solely for political purposes’. According to the narrative offered over the course of the two volumes of Foundations, thirteenth-century scholastic doctors at the university of Paris, together with those members of religious orders and others who developed their work in the context of the northern Italian city-states, were critical in establishing the first precondition, by vindicating Aristotle's vision of politics against conservative forces within the church.

The present volume has its beginnings in a conference of the same title held at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 2003 – the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. We would like to start by thanking everyone involved in making that event a success. To Holly Hamilton-Bleakley we owe both the original idea for the conference and an enormous amount of the work involved in organising it. Aysha Pollnitz and Jacqueline Rose helped us out with exemplary efficiency and cheerfulness. But our greatest thanks are, of course, due to our speakers, whose uniformly excellent papers and comments made for such a memorable and stimulating intellectual occasion. We can only regret that for reasons of space we were not able to include all their contributions in this volume, and we would like to express our gratitude in particular to David Colclough, Tim Hochstrasser, Kari Palonen and Joan Pau Rubies for their part in the proceedings. We would like to express our special gratitude to John Salmon, whom we remember for his generous help with the project and outstanding contribution to the history of European thought.

There are several reasons why, twenty-five years on, Quentin Skinner's Foundations presented an apt subject for the kind of rethinking we wanted to encourage. It was in many ways an act of rethinking itself.

In this essay I will seek to provide an introduction to the philosophical ideas behind the methodology which Quentin Skinner practised in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. I will do this through an analysis of the ways in which Skinner drew on the work of R. G. Collingwood, Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin to develop two concepts which are at the heart of his early work on method: context and agency.

These concepts pervade Skinner's work and have presented themselves at times as a pair related through an inherent tension, where an emphasis upon one leads to an escape from the other. Yet Skinner's early work on method emphasised the agency of the author, precisely because it emphasised the context in which he wrote, or so I will argue here. The ‘canonist’ method of studying the history of political philosophy which prevailed when Skinner started his work demoted authorial agency in several ways, largely because it ignored the wider social, intellectual and linguistic context out of which a text arose, and Skinner's advancement of his own method against this approach showed him to be deeply concerned to recover this agency. I will discuss two ways in which this recovery was accomplished: first, by showing that the meaning of a text was bound up with the way the author was intentionally using particular conventions of language to either affirm or change prevailing normative concepts of her time and, second, by revealing the author as a political practitioner through an insistence upon the direct relationship between political thought and political action.

Quentin Skinner's classic study The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was first published by Cambridge in 1978. This was the first of a series of outstanding publications that have changed forever the way the history of political thought is taught and practised. Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought looks afresh at the impact of the original work, asks why it still matters, and considers a number of significant agendas that it still inspires. A very distinguished international team of contributors has been assembled, including John Pocock, Richard Tuck and David Armitage, and the result is an unusually powerful and cohesive contribution to the history of ideas, of interest to large numbers of students of early modern history and political thought. In conclusion, Skinner replies to each chapter and presents his own thoughts on the latest trends and the future direction of the history of political thought.

Someone will raise doubts, however, about what we have said, objecting that the authority to pass or institute laws does not belong to the universal body of the citizens. Firstly because something that is mostly wicked and undiscerning ought not to establish the law; for these two faults, sc. malice and ignorance, must be excluded from the legislator. Indeed it was in order to avoid them in judgements, as well, that we understood the necessity of laws in chapter 11 of this discourse. But the people or the universal body of the citizens is of this nature; for men are visibly wicked and stupid for the most part, since ‘the number of the stupid is infinite’ as it says in Ecclesiastes 1. Again, because it is very hard or impossible to get the opinions of many wicked and foolish individuals to agree, whereas this is not the case with a few who are virtuous. It is therefore more expedient for law to be passed by a few men rather than by the universal body of the citizens or an unnecessary number of them. Again, in any civil community the wise and the learned are few in respect of the rest of the untaught multitude. Since, therefore, it is more expedient for law to be passed by the wise and learned than by the ignorant and the uneducated, it seems that the authority to pass them belongs to the few, and not to many or to all. Further still, it is in vain for something to be done by many if it can be done by fewer. Since, therefore, it is possible for law to be passed by the wise (who are few) – as said before – it would be in vain for the entire multitude or its greater part to be occupied in this business. The authority to legislate does not, therefore, belong to the universal body of the citizens or its prevailing part.